Andrew E. Kramer

Donetsk, Ukraine: Russia’s foreign minister accused the interim authorities in Kiev on Monday of flagrantly violating the international accord reached last week aimed at defusing the crisis in eastern Ukraine, in remarks that suggested Russia may be further preparing the groundwork for a military intervention.

The accusations made by the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, came as Vice-President Joe Biden arrived in Kiev in a show of support for its increasingly besieged government, which the Kremlin regards as a result of a Western-backed coup that seized power in late February after months of protests.

Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimean Peninsula last month in response to the crisis in Ukraine, and Mr Lavrov’s accusations suggested the Kremlin was creating a basis to justify a similar territorial grab in eastern Ukraine despite its repeated denials. Thousands of Russian troops have been massed on the border for weeks.

The Obama administration has warned that it will impose increasingly harsh sanctions on Russia if it does not help defuse the crisis in eastern Ukraine. But Mr Lavrov threw that warning back at the Americans in his angry assertions at a news conference in Moscow.

“Before giving us ultimatums, demanding that we fulfil demands within two or three days with the threat of sanctions, we would urgently call on our American partners to fully accept responsibility for those who they brought to power,” Mr Lavrov told reporters. He said all attempts to isolate Russia would fail, because Russia is “a big, independent power that knows what it wants”.

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He rejected accusations that Russia is covertly manipulating events in eastern Ukraine and subverting the accord reached in Geneva last Thursday between himself, Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of Ukraine’s interim government and the European Union.

“The authorities are doing nothing, not even lifting a finger, to address the causes behind this deep internal crisis in Ukraine,” Mr Lavrov said. The Geneva agreement, he said, “is not only not being fulfilled, but steps are being taken, primarily by those who seized power in Kiev, that are grossly breaching the agreement reached in Geneva.”

Mr Lavrov blamed the killings of three people in a shootout at a checkpoint in eastern Ukraine on Sunday on the interim government and its sympathisers. “The fact that extremists started to shoot at unarmed civilians is unacceptable,” he said.

Mr Lavrov’s criticisms came as new evidence emerged on Monday of violence aimed at pro-Russian militants in eastern Ukraine, with bodies of two members of a Moscow-backed militia pulled from the Donetsk River in Slaviansk.

At the same time, an international observer mission with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe was unable to enter Donetsk, an epicentre of pro-Russia separatism, for reasons that were not clear. Russia agreed to the observer mission at Germany’s insistence, and the group’s inability to reach the area made it all the more difficult to determine why law and order seemed to be unravelling there.

A spokesman for the European organisation told the Russian news agency Interfax that the observer mission “could not access this town out of concern for security”, without elaborating. Russia and Kiev have blamed each other for the violence.